New York City writes bill to rein in AI while insisting it wants to be the ‘AI capital of the world’

Congress spent nearly a decade holding hearings on artificial intelligence while passing almost nothing to make it safer, and the New York City Council now wants to find out whether a city can do what Washington has not. On Friday, Council Speaker Julie Menin unveiled a package of bills that would require AI systems sold in the city to pass outside validation and carry a kill switch, pay whistleblowers who report violations, and let New Yorkers sue AI companies when jailbroken tools harm them. The bills will be heard on October 5 at a Committee of the Whole hearing of all 51 council members.

“We obviously are not in any way looking to stifle innovation. We want to ensure that New York stays the AI capital of the world, but with that comes responsibility,” City Council Speaker Julie Menin told Fortune. “I don’t believe these two ideas are mutually exclusive at all. In fact, I think they go hand in hand.”

“You want to be the capital of innovation, and you want to be the capital of smart, sensible regulation and guardrails around it, because you want people to have faith in the product itself.”

The council invited Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg—the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, SpaceXAI and Meta respectively—to testify. The Oct. 5 hearing will be a Committee of the Whole, which has not happened in the City Council since 2022. Sources with knowledge of the hearing tell Fortune that none of the five requested heads are likely to testify. The City Council reserves the right to subpoena them. The companies did not immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.

Still, that doesn’t rule out other leaders from representing these companies, and the aim, Menin said, is for the public to gain trust into these institutions. “These kinds of........

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